


Bonfire

by AirgiodSLV



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-19
Updated: 2005-02-19
Packaged: 2019-07-20 10:42:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16135580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: On the last night off before the final day of principal filming, they build a bonfire. It was someone’s idea; not Billy’s, although he’s the only one who seems determined to see it through. Just the three of them, no one else invited or permitted. It’s supposed to be closure, and instead it feels like salt in a wound.





	Bonfire

**Author's Note:**

> For my Kate. Because she asked.

On the last night off before the final day of principal filming, they build a bonfire. It was someone’s idea; not Billy’s, although he’s the only one who seems determined to see it through. Just the three of them, no one else invited or permitted. It’s supposed to be closure, and instead it feels like salt in a wound.

They’re burning everything. Viggo would have approved if he knew, Billy thinks. He would understand the symbolism of the event. Postcards, keepsakes, notes…anything bought together, or given as a gift from one to another, is destined for the fire. Dom and Elijah are notorious packrats; Billy isn’t surprised to see that their boxes are easily twice the size of his. He brought everything, though. Every last thing that made him think of them while he was packing to leave.

It feels wrong, but Billy knows from experience with similar (although not the same, it’s never been like this) situations that there’s no way it can be _right._ They haven’t really talked, besides a few murmured questions about how to build the fire, and where on the beach to start it, and should they dump all of this stuff somewhere, or set it aside? The air is fresh and cold, but the atmosphere is oppressive, stifling. It feels like a funeral.

Dom is the first to toss something in, a stupid paper napkin that Billy and Elijah had taken turns writing flowery love-notes on one night while they were drunk off their asses in a pub just outside of Wellington. Billy hadn’t even known that he’d kept it. Dom’s face is expressionless, only the glint of his eyes reflecting the fire hinting at life and emotion. Billy’s hands clench around a CD case, tracing the umbilical cord of the alien baby on the cover and remembering the day Dom picked it out for him. He can buy another, easily. That isn’t the point.

“This is stupid,” Elijah says angrily, and Billy jumps a bit, because it’s the first time any of them have really said anything, and the volume is startling and unexpected over the muted crackle of flames. “You can’t just _burn_ something like this.” He sounds on the edge of something, barely contained and crackling, and Billy swallows while he tries to think of something to say. Dom doesn’t say anything. Dom turns away, and tosses a leather thong into the fire, with a charm hanging from it that Billy honestly doesn’t remember.

Maybe one day he would have said that of all of this, wouldn’t have remembered anything about this album or that poster except that someone had once given it to him as a gift. He doesn’t want to think that’s possible, but he can’t swear to it. He can’t promise it would never happen, and neither can they. Billy has tried to look past this, past the end of New Zealand, he really has. It just sometimes seems as if there’s nothing to look _to._

Billy finally finds his voice, and pitches it not to soothe, but to calm, a simple statement of fact, a question. “If there was one thing you could save,” he asks Elijah, turning the jewel case over in his hands, “What would it be?”

Dom doesn’t look at him, still sullen and withdrawn, walled-up and internalizing while Elijah swings like a pendulum between anger and despair. Billy isn’t honestly sure which one of them to worry most about. Instinct says Dom, because Dom will bottle everything where Elijah rages and spits and eventually works through whatever is bothering him. Dom needs to be drawn out, handled carefully.

But Billy has misread Elijah before, and he doesn’t want this to be one of the times that Elijah surprises him. Elijah looks fragile but sharp, like freshly-shattered glass, and Billy wants to hold him and shake him and fuck him all at once.

“Everything,” Elijah says, with a tremor in his voice so slight that Bill almost doesn’t hear it. “All of it.” Bill stares him down, wondering if the prickle-burn behind his eyes signals emotion of his own, or sympathetic pain for the two of them, knowing that they are going through the same thing he is. They aren’t tears of sorrow, these. Tears of impotent frustration, rather, and fury that life is inexorably what it is.

Elijah sighs, eyes dropping, and Billy sees the pendulum swing back to grief and resignation before his eyes. “…the memories,” he finishes softly, and Billy swallows again because he has to, because he can’t speak around the lump in his throat, and it feels as if something needs to be said.

Dom beats him to it, expression still impassive but voice gentle, understanding and rough around the edges. “We’ve still got that,” he points out, and Billy sees that his fist is clenched tight around the stuffed monkey that Elijah bought him in Sydney, the one they all claim shares Dom’s ears.

“Will you…?” Elijah asks, and stops. Billy knows the question, knows that Elijah has looked at him and Dom, at the plane tickets and the maps and the interviews, but there’s really no way to ask, _will you have sex without me when I’m not there,_ and Elijah never would.

“No,” Billy answers, because he knows without even having to think that it would be different, completely…not wrong, exactly, but neither would it be _right._ Not like it is with the three of them together. “We won’t.” Dom nods, and there’s a drawn-out pause in which everything is almost the way it should be, before the fire pops and Billy has to look away. He moves to throw the CD album onto the fire, to just get through this as methodically as possible so that he can go home and get very, very drunk, but suddenly Elijah is there at his side, staying his hand.

Elijah’s mouth is soft, tentative and hopeful, as ripe as it was the first day Billy and Dom took turns kissing him breathless, huddled beneath a shop-front awning on this very beach in the pouring rain. Billy kisses with more urgency than he expected to feel, pulling Elijah to him with an impatient and desperate sound, and Elijah yields with a whimper that isn’t a protest.

Billy isn’t aware of Dom moving until he’s with them, hand on Billy’s arm, and then Billy has to pull away, because it’s too much, too fast, when he already felt like he couldn’t handle any more. “This is how it should end,” Elijah whispers, and the fire moves from six meters away to the pit of Billy’s stomach, burning like hot coals.

“Please stay,” Elijah says. He hesitates before the cliché, but Billy hears it anyway, knows because he’s thinking the same thing. _I don’t want to be alone tonight._

“All right,” Billy answers, voice burred and heavy, and breathes out along with Elijah as Dom slides next to them to form a three-way embrace, foreheads pressed together and eyes closed.

In a way, it’s a beginning.


End file.
